It
is difficult to overstate the controversial impact of the philosopher
Louis Althusser on the western Marxist intellectuals of the 1970s. He
began by
rejecting the "humanist," Hegelian Marxism that had played such an
important role in inspiring the revolutionary uprising of May 1968 in
Paris, and, more broadly, the entire New Left of the 1960s, whether in
the name of Lukacs, Marcuse, Gramsci, or Jean-Paul Sartre. Instead
Althusser attempted to renew the "scientific" dimension of Marxism by
purging
it of an Hegelian heritage that involved, according to him, such
central and ultimately idealist concepts as that of society as an
"expressive totality," the
proletariat as the subject of history, revolution as the
transcendence of alienation, and the historical process as development
toward a telos, a consummating end or goal. Proposing instead a
rigorous form of "anti-humanism" centered on concepts of society as a
articulated totality of complex and heterogenous elements, or
"instances," "structural
causality" in which the economy is determinate "in the last
instance", and history as a process without a subject or goal,
Althusser was widely seen as the representative of an ascendent
structuralist tendency in European thought that included such thinkers
as the linguist Ferdinand de Sasussure, the anthropologist Claude Levi
Strauss, and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. However Althusser himself
always rejected the "structuralist" label, and instead identified Spinoza as the primary inspiration for his philosophical revolution in the Essays on Self-Criticism
excerpted in the first entry below ("Althusser's Spinoza"). In that rather brief treatment, he
claims to have discovered in Spinoza a radically "materialist"
approach to philosophical theory, one that rejects the primacy of
consciousness and subjectivity as well as teleological causality as a
genuine category of knowledge. But above all, Althusser sees in Spinoza's
crtique of "inadequate ideas" a forerunner of Marx's critique of
ideology as an ensemble of imaginary representations through which
people adopt a false and distorted relationship to their real
conditions of life. Though Althusser's use of Spinoza
lacked scholarly sophistication, it nevertheless initiated the turn to
Spinoza that inspired the far more sophisticated and extensive interpretations of a
younger generation of radical intellectuals, including Gilles Deleuze,
Antonio Negri, Pierre Machery, Alexandre Matheron, and Etienne Balibar, coauthor of Reading Capital, probably Althusser's most important book.